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for any urban dweller sick and tired of the rat race. The hummocks, tangled streams, and forested rivers allowed a somnambulistic urbanite a chance to follow his inner compass. Self-possessed when writing about Alaska, full of perspicacity, Sheldon charmingly made first-person declarations about “my wilderness,” “my river,” and “my country” to express his deep love for the sprawling territory. Back in New York, he would always tell friends that he’d left his heart in Alaska. “For Sheldon the Alaskan wilderness was not a tooth-and-claw setting for the defiance of death as it had been to Jack London and Robert Service,” the historian Roderick Frazier Nash wrote in Wilderness and the American Mind. “He saw it as a frontier, but especially in regard to big game habitat, a perishable frontier that needed protection.”8

II

Born in 1867 (the year the Andrew Johnson administration purchased Alaska from Russia) to a Vermont marble-quarrying family, Sheldon grew up with the beautiful Green Mountains as his backyard. All he remembered about his childhood was the beatitude of sunny summer days and the high drama of magnificent snowstorms. Kinship with nature was an inherent part of growing up. Vermont had a number of peaks over 3,000 feet high—Mount Mansfield, Mount Ellen, and Camels Hump among them—that the teenage Sheldon climbed. Canoeing in Vermont’s rivers—the Winooski and Lamoille in particular—also was a skill that he learned growing up along the hogbacks of the Front Range. When he was an adolescent, his hikes in Otter Creek Valley, where the brook trout were thick, turned him into an ardent outdoor sportsman. Nobody else in Rutland, Vermont, learned how to use an ax as skillfully as Sheldon. And because the family business was marble quarrying, Sheldon was also skilled with a chisel and hammer.

Exceedingly bright, Sheldon attended Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, reading sportsmen’s literature by Izaak Walton, Robert Barnwell Roosevelt, and Frank Forester. After prep school he went to Yale University. Sheldon quickly became a leader of the class of 1890. He was a lover of American poetry, particularly Longfellow and Lowell; and he joined the Elizabethan Club. Nobody, however, remembered his performances in plays. The words that his classmates used over and over again to describe him were “rugged” and “no nonsense.” One afternoon a salesman came to Yale, banging on students’ doors, offering boxes of Cuban cigars. Not long after the salesman’s visit, Sheldon noticed that his flute had been stolen from his quarters. Immediately he turned detective. For a long day he visited all of New Haven’s and New York’s pawnshops, hoping to find his flute. His determination paid off. At one of the Manhattan shops, Sheldon stumbled on the petty thief, the flute sticking out of his suit coat pocket. Without hesitation Sheldon, like a linebacker, tackled him to the ground. He then made a citizen’s arrest. The salesman went to jail and Sheldon returned to Yale with his treasured instrument.9

Sheldon’s first job after college was working for the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern Railroad. From young manhood onward, he was transfixed by the most forlorn reaches of North America. Bouncing around Mexico for a decade, he made a risky investment in Potosi, a Chihuahuan silver and lead mine, which paid out huge dividends. Endowed with a certain charisma, Sheldon became friends with the family of Don Luis Terazas, powerful landowners in Mexico, whose haciendas were over 8 million acres in size. Everything, it seemed, was going his way financially.

Independently wealthy at age thirty-five, in 1903, Sheldon abruptly retired from business. Wide-browed, with neatly parted dark brown hair, Sheldon didn’t want to become a gent in a blue blazer holding court at the Polo Lounge or the Newport races. He wanted to be a ruddy-cheeked foot soldier in Roosevelt’s conservationist revolution. Hoping to model himself on TR—the jaunty naturalist who happened to live in the White House—Sheldon contacted Dr. C. Hart Merriam and Dr. Edward W. Nelson at the